Now you are walking in Paris all alone in the crowd As herds of bellowing buses drive by Love's anguish tightens your throat As if you were never to be loved again If you lived in the old days you would enter a monastery You are ashamed when you discover yourself reciting a prayer You make fun of yourself and like the fire of Hell your laughter crackles The sparks of your laugh gild the depths of your life It's a painting hanging in a dark museum And sometimes you go and look at it close up

Apollinaire was active as a journalist and art critic for Matin Intransigeant and Paris Journal. His maternal grandfather was a general in the Russian Imperial Army killed in the Crimean War. In an open-handed preface to the catalogue of the Brussels Indépendants show Apollinaire stated that these 'new painters' accepted the name of Cubists which has been given to them.

Guillaume Apollinaire (French pronunciation: ​[ɡijom apɔliˈnɛʁ]; 26 August 1880 – 9 November 1918) was a French poet playwright short story writer novelist and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother. Among the foremost poets of the early 20th century he is credited with coining the word Surrealism and writing one of the earliest works described as surrealist the play The Breasts of Tiresias (1917 used as the basis for a 1947 opera). Two years after being wounded in World War I he died in the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 at age 38.